By Roy Ockert Jr.
When I moved back to Jonesboro in 1970, it was to fulfill an ambition that had been born during my time as a student at Arkansas State College. In the journalism program here my teacher and mentor had been the legendary L.W. “Tex” Plunkett, who had been its founder and had made it into Arkansas’ best.
I wanted to follow his footsteps into teaching, and where better to do it than my alma mater. So I went to graduate school, then took a job teaching journalism and advising student publications at what was then Southern State College in Magnolia. Within a couple of years I was lobbying for a place on the A-State faculty.
Tex obliged when my friend and former adviser, Joel Gambill, decided to pursue a doctorate. So for the second time I took a job he had vacated (the first was as a part-time sports writer for the Jonesboro Evening Sun in my freshman year).
Thus, I would become the fourth faculty adviser of The Herald of Arkansas State University, a name we had given the student newspaper when the college attained university status in 1967, my senior year. State College Herald no longer was a proper fit.
Its first adviser had been Dr. F.W. Plunkett, followed by his adopted son Tex and then Joel during my senior year, when he became the second journalism instructor.
Actually, in the early years of the Aggie Herald, various English teachers alternated briefly as its “sponsor.” No doubt, they drew straws, and the loser served time as newspaper sponsor, a role that can quickly get a teacher in trouble with the administration. But that’s precisely the role for which I had been aiming.
When I entered the classroom that fall, I was barely older than my students. Some had been freshman reporters during my senior year, when I had been co-editor of the Herald with my future bride. Together we led the coverage of A-State’s historical climb to university status, producing a special edition that has become somewhat historic in itself.
We married on the day after graduating as part of the first class with “University” on our diplomas and rode off to Oklahoma, where a year later we had our first child. So I came back to Jonesboro a family man, a bread-winner, and within a couple of years we had our second daughter and soon after that our first house.
Last week we joined others, young and old, in a celebration of the Herald’s 100th anniversary. We were immediately distracted by a slide presentation showing on the huge screens in Centennial Hall, featuring pictures from and about the Herald, its student leaders and faculty advisers down through the years.
I was to sit on a panel of former Herald editors, but I really just wanted to bathe in the nostalgia of seeing former classmates, fraternity brothers and A-State faculty and staff members — too many of whom are no longer with us. In the middle of so many pictures was Tex — as a young man, then an older one.
The Herald, you see, was a big part of our lives, Pat’s and mine, and it has served the A-State campus well for a century. On its pages have appeared the bylines of many student journalists who went on to distinguished careers in newspapering, broadcast media and related fields including education.
Tex made the Herald an integral part of the journalism education program. He taught the fundamentals of news writing and editing, but then created the opportunities to practice our craft for a campus newspaper. The fundamentals are easy. Gathering the information, putting it together and the publishing it for a broad reading audience — that’s the challenge for journalists. The Herald has long been a vehicle for learning while serving as a communications medium for the university community.
Newspapers — that is, in their traditional form, printed on thin paper — have been in free-fall in recent years. The financial model for a great, once highly profitable industry no longer works as well. In the near future newspapers may be digital only, or — who knows? — we may see an entirely different medium than we can imagine today.
But good journalism will always be critical to our democratic republic, and therefore we must educate future journalists. For now the Herald still comes off a printing press once a week on better paper that the best community dailies. It still serves both as a learning experience and a communications medium.
As it turned out, I didn’t stick it out as a journalism teacher because I found that I was better suited and more satisfied being an editor than an academic. But I got a second education by sharing an office with Tex for the several years and then got to hire many other former Herald staff members over 30 years as an editor of community newspapers.
Almost all were well-prepared because they had learned the fundamentals of journalism by practicing on the student newspaper.
Roy Ockert is a former editor of The Jonesboro Sun, The Courier at Russellville and The Batesville Guard. He can be reached at royo@suddenlink.net.